University Li(fe)-brary

This is a horrific place. I keep deliberately incarcerating myself in the UL in the vain hope that library hours produce work. One day I will look back on this and laugh.*

In good news, had a nice evening drinking with Libby and watching The Lovely Bones. Pretty sure I cried three times, which is something given the basic complete inaudibility of the stream. Moral of the story = don't trust anyone who tries to lure you to a secret kids' hideout (the hideout is secret, not the kids) in the middle of a field.

I've got to a point in my life where a misplaced apostrophe is THE FUNNIEST THING EVER. 4343 words of dissertation down, probably one million to go. I write at approx. one word per hour.

Basic summary of my day in the UL:

1. Get there before 9.30. This is before the reading room opens (I've only done this once).

2. Wait with the seething hordes of maniac academics (you can tell because they manage to read books angrily in a way that just screams 'take the book I want and I'll make your life unliveable').

3. Sit down. Spread out books. Go to tea rooms for cup of tea and snack. Get shouted at by the inexplicably aggressive man. ('IVE HAD TO CALL YOUR NAME FOUR TIMES FOR THIS PANINI')

4. Pretend that being in the tea rooms constitutes a social life by chatting frantically to anyone and everyone you know, even if you only know them because you stare at them in the tea rooms.

5. Return to seat. Check facebook, googlemail, facebook, googlemail, blog, facebook.

6. Read a sentence. Write one word. Erase it. Write a different word in another paragraph. Delete that.

7. Repeat steps 3-6 a few times.

8. At six o clock, leave.

I aspire to look like this


*Manically, from my prison cell.

Yes I Make Post Hi (Knights at Danielle's)

So there has been Christmas and Wales and New Year and some parties including togas and running practically naked in the snow and punch with fully seven types of alcohols (a.k.a. 7-Alcy Punch). Standard nights involve bellowing, beer and Zone Horror. I wish the last sentence could have been alliterative but it just wasn't.

Sometimes I think that I really like being in the countryside because when I am there I always read loads and eat loads (I had a 9 course dinner) and have a great time not worrying about the matrices of urban social dependency.

Last night we went out for Secret Santa Dinner and afterwards in the pub there was a group of drunken louts and one said 'Say happy birthday to my friend, it's his birthday' and the little 'WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO CLAIM SPURIOUS AUTHORITY OVER ME/PRESUME THAT I WILL RESPOND TO YOU IN THE WAY THAT YOU WANT' switch triggered, and I predictably refused, and so predictably the situation escalated with various drunken men coming over to make nice before reiterating the demand. It could have been nastier, there was some muttering about feminist dykes (I assumed they were talking about some very intelligent modern geography), but the main problem was in the drawn out length of the whole non-event. Obviously it would have been easier to just say it, so everybody could move on with their lives. But I just can't help analysing these things in terms of social power structures and fuck me if I'm going to concede to a presupposed gendered power dichotomy in the way required. That probably makes me a massive dick.

I have also realised that Andrea Dworkin is in fact AMAZING and massively misrepresented. Her book 'Woman Hating' is pretty much spot on. Simplistically, she links the regulated enforcement of gender roles to traditional fairytale mythology, and advocates replacing this understanding of gender with one informed by androgyne mythologies. And she has some hard-hitting (Daddy would say 'knockabout') stuff about foot-binding and witch burning. And also advocates the destruction of the family, incest and bestiality.

I basically love you Andrea.